Distinctly Montana Magazine

N O R M A N M A C L E A N S P E C I A L I S S U E 1 5 big river, a tall figure with a little boy behind him holding a basket and a medium-sized figure downstream. They could be the Reverend Maclean, George Croonenberghs holding his basket, and my dad downstream, or even me holding George's basket. The final image has one figure in a big river. That would be me on the Blackfoot. I'm the last man standing. The images have the same mood and tell the story of the book. ARE THERE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN HOME WATERS AND YOUR FATHER'S POSTHUMOUS BOOK, YOUNG MEN AND FIRE? I wouldn't have written Home Waters if he hadn't written Young Men and Fire. It's as simple as that. I was at the Chicago Tribune in 1994, having done 30 years with the paper, when the South Canyon Fire in Colorado killed fourteen firefighters, similar to the Mann Gulch Fire in my dad's book. A lot of people told me, "You should do a book on that," and I thought, God almighty, why? We'd just been through all kinds of things getting Young Men and Fire into print, dealing with the effects of the movie of A River Runs Through It. It took almost a year before I quit the Tribune— I did not retire, I quit—and wrote Fire on the Mountain about South Canyon, and that got me started as an author. YOUR FIVE PREVIOUS BOOKS MORE OR LESS FALL INTO THE CATEGORY OF STRAIGHT REPORTAGE. HOME WATERS IS A MEMOIR, A DIFFERENT BIRD ENTIRELY. I didn't have trouble making the switch. I embraced it. Straight nonfiction narration is a wonderful genre—and I've been at it, I'm afraid, almost 60 years. But I found this new genre liberating and had a lot of fun doing it. LET'S TALK A LITTLE BIT ABOUT MONTANA AS THE PLACE WHERE YOU'VE BEEN GOING FOR OVER THREE-QUARTERS OF A CENTURY. WHAT CHANGES HAVE YOU SEEN, FOR BETTER OR WORSE? Our parents took my sister, Jean, and me to the Reverend Maclean's church in Missoula to be baptized in 1944—the records are still there. Montana has changed a great deal since those days, but there are some constants. Seeley Lake, the town and the community, has always been based on timber, recreation and the Forest Service. There's a ranger station there, a sawmill—Pyramid Lumber—that thankfully has survived the black hole implosion of the lumber busi- ness in the West. And, of course, there's always been the summer crowd, the recreational crowd. But they've all changed in fundamental ways. The Forest Service now is second-guessed to death. Big- time logging has vanished from public lands in the Swan and Clearwater Valleys. The recreation side has changed THE RIVER WAS CUT BY THE WORLD'S GREAT FLOOD AND RUNS OVER ROCKS IN THE BASEMENT OF TIME. ON SOME OF THE ROCKS ARE TIMELESS RAINDROPS. UNDER THE ROCKS ARE THE WORDS, AND SOME OF THE WORDS ARE THEIRS. Eventually, all things merge into one, and river runs through it. I am haunted by waters.

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